Lucid Group has announced it was successfully able to raise $1.515 billion from its previously announce equity offering. At the same time Lucid has dropped the base price on its Air Grand Touring luxury electric sedan to cap off what has been an extremely difficult year for the automaker.
The majority of the new funding came from one of Lucid’s existing investors, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. According to a press release from Lucid on Monday, about $915 million of the funds were raised through the sale of 85.7 million shares to an affiliate of the Saudi wealth fund. The remaining $600 million was raised by selling 56.2 million shares of its common stock.
As of the most recent update Lucid had $3.85 billion in cash or cash equivalents as of September 30. Depending on how much cash Lucid burns through in Q4 (it burned through nearly $750 million in Q3), that figure could be around $4 to $4.5 billion when it announces its Q4 and full year financial results next year.
Lucid says the extra money will be used to “further strengthen its balance sheet and liquidity position.”
However, the infusion of cash comes at a time when Lucid is struggling, to say the least. The company has only produced 2,282 cars through the first three quarters of the year, after originally hoping to build more than 20,000 in 2022. Along with the low production the company is also reporting low sales, a drop in the number of reservations, and offering discounts to employees and customers. Their troubles even led to Elon Musk responding to a Drive Tesla report on Twitter warning (again) that they are not likely to make it.
If all of that wasn’t enough, they have now also lowered the price on the Air Grand Touring variant. Until now the Air Grand Touring started at $154,000 USD but according to a recent update to the Lucid configurator, that number has dropped by $16,000 to $138,000 USD.
Lucid has not slashed the price by 12% but has instead removed some features and made them optional, thereby lowering the base price in the process. The three features that are now missing and have been made optional are DreamDrive Pro (+$10,000), Surreal Sound Pro (+$4,000), and 21″ Aero Blade wheels (+$2,000).
In its place as standard features are DreamDrive, Surreal Sound, and the 20″ Aero Lite wheels.
According to Motor1, Lucid said the changes were made due to customer feedback which showed they wanted more flexibility in the ordering process. Interestingly the changes are not present on the Canadian configurator and the Air Grand Touring is still priced at $212,500 CAD north of the border.
